INNOVATION RULES // RICH KARLGAARD
Serial bloomer: Pat Gelsinger.
Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of Vmware— a $6.6 billion software company—has had a career rise that’s an American throwback. His story is that of an unknown farm boy whose talents were revealed in a trade-school test, thus propelling the boy to his first Silicon Valley hightech job without even a four-year college degree. That rarely happens anymore. Silicon Valley has become a data-driven, talent-sorting machine that automatically rejects all but the most obvious winners. Growing up on the family farm in Robesonia, Pa., Gelsinger knew hard work from a young age. “Our family raised dairy cows, pigs, soybeans and sorghum.” Gelsinger learned to wake at 5 a.m. to “go straight to a day of dusty labor and try not to get kicked by an animal.”
Predictably, Gelsinger rebelled. He was a self-described smart aleck in high school, hanging out with the wrong kids and going nowhere. But one day he aced an electronics technology test given by the Lincoln Technical Institute, and the seed for achievement was planted. By age 18—having trained himself to sleep five hours a night— Gelsinger had completed two degrees: a Robesonia high school diploma and an associate degree from Lincoln Tech. As luck would have it, a recruiter from a young California company, Intel, interviewed the top Lincoln grads. And at 18 Gelsinger took his first plane trip, to Silicon Valley, and began work as an Intel quality-control technician.
It wasn’t long before Gelsinger “wanted to be on the other side of the table ... the engineer who decided what to do, not the technician who did the grunt work.” Intel had a generous tuition-reimbursement program, and Gelsinger earned his electrical engineering degrees at Santa Clara University and Stanford, while holding down his Intel job.
Working on Intel’s 386 processor in the 1980s, Gelsinger caught the attention of soon-to-be- CEO Andy Grove. Grove surprised Gelsinger with a phone call and began bluntly quizzing him about his goals at Intel. Gelsinger was so intimidated he could barely speak. Grove said, “Those are lousy answers. Be in my office within two weeks with better ones.”
By the late 1980s Gelsinger had risen to chief architect of Intel’s 486 processor, the globally dominant chip in PCS and laptops. Not long after, he became Intel’s first chief technical officer.
Faith and endurance
Sensing he would never break out of the tech-management ghetto at Intel, Gelsinger moved to computer storage giant EMC, in Massachusetts. He left Intel with a renewed determination to become a CEO someday. He asked and received permission to attend EMC board meetings, where he would seek out two members per meeting for coaching. One board member was EMC cofounder Richard Egan, who told Gelsinger to “dress like a CEO” and “learn corporate finance.”
The next weekend Gelsinger and his wife went to a Nordstrom’s department store to upgrade his wardrobe. He then hired a Columbia University finance professor to tutor him privately. “I remember a vacation during which my wife read novels and I read Corporate Finance, an 1,100-page book,” Gelsinger says.
Gelsinger’s unusual rise to CEO is a highprofile lesson in how to keep moving forward in one’s career. “Why, then,” I asked him, “do the majority of smart and talented people manage to get stuck?”
We were meeting in Gelsinger’s office at Vmware headquarters in Palo Alto. Gelsinger works at a stand-up desk, but he sat at his table to answer. “If you asked ten people if they want to improve themselves, eight will say yes. But only two will follow through. Which means a majority of people—60% of us—lack the know-how, energy or discipline to move forward. If you really want to move forward, the answer seems obvious: Find a purpose, set goals, stay healthy and seek mentors who will hold you accountable.”
But there’s another factor in Gelsinger’s success, and he’s not shy about talking about it. He runs a company of more than 18,000 employees in a highly secular part of the U.S.— the San Francisco Bay Area, where 61% of adults don’t attend church regularly. However, Gelsinger is Silicon Valley’s most outspoken Christian CEO. He is careful to run Vmware in a “non-churchy” way, using such secular words as “values and purpose” in his leadership language, but he runs his own life strictly by his faith. “My favorite Bible verse and guiding principle is Colossians 3:23: ‘Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.’ ”
“I love that verse,” he says. “I can get the snot kicked out of me at a board meeting or during a sales call, and I can rebound the next day, full of joy and purpose, to start anew.” F